SharePoint 2010 (The Bottom Line)
October 27, 2009
Having seen what the trends are as outlined by Steve Ballmer, these are some of the items on the long list of new features and enhancements that I thought warrants a mention.
For starters the name has changed to drop the “Office” element from the brand, this does not mean less integration and in actual fact the integration has been enhanced to allow for surfacing data into the clients such as Outlook and Word with productivity enhancement tools and configuration. To crown it this data can be made Read / Write.
Secondly the strap line has changed to “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and Web“. The wheel has changed somewhat however not too much and still provides the high level overview of grouped functionality.
The value propositions are as follows:
Connect and Empower People
Cut Cost with Unified Infrastructure
Rapidly Respond to Business Needs
This simplified message very much aligns with the three stakeholders that you will most likely encounter namely Users, IT and the Business. All the messages and enhancements can easily be grouped under these three main headings.
The enhancements that I believe will open new opportunities for SharePoint are the following:
Multi-tenancy – That recurring revenue stream that have been eluding you forever and a day might very well no be possible as it allow tenants to happily live together in perfect harmony on a single implementation. The only caveat is that you should be able to speak PowerShell, a small sacrifice really.
Scalable Architecture – much more granular than before and allowing for a configuration that can be as standard as you want or as complex as your environment requires. Service Applications (preciously shared service providers) are now broken down into true service that can be scaled out depending on you needs and even load balanced via a built in feature or additional load balancing provisions should it be required.
Tagging – Aka Metadata, Folksonomies, Taxonomies. Whatever name you choose for this, it certainly makes the content relevant and up to date by allowing real users to associate the context they want to their data. I can see this taking off a big way. Managing structure taxonomy, something I have had many a request for in the past, is now done and can be shared across farms. Pretty decent to be honest.
Standards Based – In broad terms much of what is been developed have followed some sort of standard where applicable. The most notable instance of this is the web interface that is WCAG 2.0 compliant, someone did slip that it is AA however I have seen no written evidence to this effect.
When 7500 people come together to Share their enthusiasm for a software product that is not so much for recreation, you start thinking resistance is futile…
SharePoint Conference 2009 Keynote Summary
October 21, 2009
Steve Balmer had a good introduction to what he believes the strategy will be going forward. I’ll summarise my view of the world as I see it, not always aligned with those of others.
It basically comes down to what analysts have been saying for a long time. Any enterprise has an IT services element that can broadly be divided into two types of offerings. These are Differentiating Services and Non-Differentiating services.
With the new “cloud” looming large it seems that no one will commit to fully move all there services into it as yet but that it would be a good place to move all non-differentiating services freeing up resources to create the stuff that makes you (your enterprise) unique and gives you the edge over the competitor.
Good candidates would not to be moved would be your eCom Site that outperforms any high street store. Chances are you would not want to surrender this to the cloud as yet. However stuff like document management, mail etc might be good services to release into the cloud allowing to focus more resource onto the areas that will allow for innovation.
If anyone follows what Gartner and Forrester have to say these days you would probably be wise to the fact that Mobile is the next desktop and that Television is an expected area for growth, most likely as we all know how to use it but in terms of getting useful data from it its pretty useless.
Following sound principles like standards, WCAG and more, makes life easier in terms of cross platform support, however Steve made it clear that all will not always be well related to operating systems that resemble fruit (Apple) and related browsers for obvious reasons.
Moving forward the design seems to focus on releasing data from the vaults (databases) that currently lock them up and to make it easier to govern implementations. “Dog food” and all that dictates that when you run an environment the scale of the cloud you would most likely want to know what you are doing, when it comes to operations. These lessons and tools are making its way into the product, however as rightly pointed out governance is 80% Process and 20% Technology
Development tools have also been enhanced to now actually “speak” SharePoint and the ability to run an implementation on Windows Vista and 7 makes it much easier to be productive. (This will not be done on my watch for the obvious reasons). Everything is moving towards PowerShell however it is not all there yet. Expect more to come I guess and yes STSAdm will still be working.
In summary all is pretty much as expected and as things are getting better in terms of scalability and governance. I can’t say that it was a big surprise except for SQL Server Power Pivot. Allowing you to work with masses of data in excel (desktop) and server-side at warp speed. Pretty impressive to say the least, part of brining BI to the masses
SharePoint 2010 the Long and Short of it.
October 20, 2009
Been really hard for me to drag myself to
Vegas for a week of sunshine and getting to see the new line up Microsoft has
installed for us in its new release of SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint Conference 2009 Las Vegas
October 20, 2009
Finally arrived in Las Vegas after a long wait. Have to say that it is truly worth it, even if it is just for the great weather. I'll over the following days post some of the new developments that I deem to be worth while.
Publish InfoPath 2007 Form as PDF Programmatically C#
December 19, 2008
Simple way to publish a Infopath Form to PDF using C# and VSTA
Clients require the following download:
namespace Template_Test
{
///
///
///
public
partial
class
FormCode
{
///
/// Internal Startup
///
public
void InternalStartup()
{
EventManager.FormEvents.Submit += new
SubmitEventHandler(FormEvents_Submit);
}
///
/// Form Submit Event
///
///
///
public
void FormEvents_Submit(object sender, SubmitEventArgs e)
{
//SUGGEST WE FIND A SAFE AND PERSONAL PLACE TO STORE THE FILE, NO MUCKING WITH PERMISSIONS
string fileName = string.Format(@”{0}\{1}.pdf”, System.Environment.GetFolderPath(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), “TestFile”);
//CHANGE THE VIEW TO THE REPORT VIEW (IF SUCH A THING IS DEFINED)
this.Application.ActiveWindow.XmlForm.ViewInfos.SwitchView(“Public”);
//EXPORT THE FILE TO PDF
this.CurrentView.Export(fileName, ExportFormat.Pdf);
//CONVERT THE FILE TO BINARY READING IT FROM THE APPLICATION DATA FOLDER
string base64 = ConvertPDFtoBinary(fileName);
//STORE THE FILE BLOB IN THE CURRENT XML DOCUMENT
StoreFileData(base64);
//TEST METHOD TO PERSIST THE FILE FROM BASE64
ConvertBinaryToPDF();
}
///
/// Store the File Data in the current xml structure as base64
///
///
string containing base64 data
public
void StoreFileData(string base64)
{
XPathNavigator navigator = this.MainDataSource.CreateNavigator();
XPathNavigator field = navigator.SelectSingleNode(“//my:assetTracking/my:fileStorage”, this.NamespaceManager);
//CHECK IF “nil” ATTRIBUTE EXISTS ON THIS NODE
DeleteNil(field);
field.SetValue(base64);
}
///
/// Check if the “nil” attribute exists on this node
///
///
Node to check
public
void DeleteNil(XPathNavigator node)
{
if (node.MoveToAttribute(“nil”, “http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”))
node.DeleteSelf();
}
///
/// Convert PDF file to Binary string base64
///
///
Name of the file
///
public
string ConvertPDFtoBinary(string fileName)
{
System.IO.FileInfo fileInfo = new System.IO.FileInfo(fileName);
byte[] buffer = new
Byte[fileInfo.Length];
using (System.IO.FileStream fileStream = fileInfo.OpenRead())
{
fileStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
}
return System.Convert.ToBase64String(buffer);
}
///
/// Convert Binary base64 string back to a file and save in application data
///
///
/// This is simply a test method to prove the concept
///
public
void ConvertBinaryToPDF()
{
XPathNavigator navigator = this.MainDataSource.CreateNavigator();
XPathNavigator field = navigator.SelectSingleNode(“//my:something/my:fileStorage”, this.NamespaceManager);
string base64 = (field.Value as
string);
if (base64 is
string)
{
byte[] buffer = System.Convert.FromBase64String(base64);
using (FileStream fileStream = new
FileStream(string.Format(@”{0}\{1}.pdf”, System.Environment.GetFolderPath(System.Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData), “TestFileFromBinary”), FileMode.CreateNew))
{
fileStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
fileStream.Close();
}
}
}
}
}
Excel Services Access Denied – Single Server
December 18, 2008
-
stsadm -o set-ecssecurity -accessmodel delegation -ssp
stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs
iisreset
For Farm installations you would require Kerberos see related links…
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262899.aspx
STSADM Start Excel Services
December 18, 2008
-
STSADM.EXE -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype “Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.ExcelServerSharedWebService, Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c”
STSADM Template Names for creating sites
December 15, 2008
Can never find this when looking for it
GLOBAL#0 = Global template
STS#0 = Team Site
STS#1 = Blank Site
STS#2 = Document Workspace
MPS#0 = Basic Meeting Workspace
MPS#1 = Blank Meeting Workspace
MPS#2 = Decision Meeting Workspace
MPS#3 = Social Meeting Workspace
MPS#4 = Multipage Meeting Workspace
CENTRALADMIN#0 = Central Admin Site
WIKI#0 = Wiki Site
BLOG#0 = Blog
BDR#0 = Document Center
OFFILE#0 = Records Center
OFFILE#1 = Records Center
OSRV#0 = Shared Services Administration Site
SPS#0 = SharePoint Portal Server Site
SPSPERS#0 = SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space
SPSMSITE#0 = Personalization Site
SPSTOC#0 = Contents area Template
SPSTOPIC#0 = Topic area template
SPSNEWS#0 = News Site
CMSPUBLISHING#0 = Publishing Site
BLANKINTERNET#0 = Publishing Site
BLANKINTERNET#1 = Press Releases Site
BLANKINTERNET#2 = Publishing Site with Workflow
SPSNHOME#0 = News Site
SPSSITES#0 = Site Directory
SPSCOMMU#0 = Community area template
SPSREPORTCENTER#0 = Report Center
SPSPORTAL#0 = Collaboration Portal
SRCHCEN#0 = Search Center with Tabs
PROFILES#0 = Profiles
BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER#0 = Publishing Portal
SPSMSITEHOST#0 = My Site Host
SRCHCENTERLITE#0 = Search Center
SRCHCENTERLITE#1 = Search Center
SPSBWEB#0 = SharePoint Portal Server BucketWeb Template
Edit Page in SharePoint without the menu
December 5, 2008
Append this to end of the url ?PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2
Private Views are done as follows ?PageView=Personal&ToolPaneView=2
More on this can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/danielmcpherson/archive/2004/10/11/240863.aspx
Found some javascript to add to favourites, not too sure they are but will dig em out and post it.
Install SharePoint Templates using Script
November 27, 2008
Place the scripts below in one